Month: August 2011

A culture antithetical to ideas?

An interesting opinion piece by Neal Gabler in the NY Times today, proposing that our culture is not conducive to generation or dissemination of “big ideas.” The thesis is that popular media and social networking do not promote the kind of discourse that is useful in the identification and development of important, revolutionary ideas. He says it’s particularly tough for social scientists:

because they are scientists and empiricists rather than generalists in the humanities, the place from which ideas were customarily popularized, they suffer a double whammy: not only the whammy against ideas generally but the whammy against science, which is typically regarded in the media as mystifying at best, incomprehensible at worst.

I am sympathetic to the idea (pun intended) that the 140-character tweet is not useful for development of integrative idea generation. And I am also in agreement that we sometimes confuse gathering information with knowledge. But I am not sure I am ready to make a wholesale condemnation of new media for the decline. I would be more interested in the ways educational systems emphasize knowledge (as evidenced in standardized multiple-choice tests) over critical inquiry and exploring ideas.

I am also interested in how 2 factors may be important in idea versus knowledge generation. One is the large number of researchers generating data, and another is the contingencies imposed on academics by tenure systems may contribute to the generation of knowledge over ideas. For example, the competition to publish in a top-tier journal is intense partly as a product of more data being generated, and so the best strategy is to generate lots of experimental data, and hope that one of those experimental lines might be good enough to make it into a journal. This may be at odds with a more considered approach that emphasizes taking an idea and following it to its conclusion (be it productive or non-productive) or following tangents that emerge later in the process, rather than abandoning it because we need to move onto the “next big thing” which might be publishable.

That’s not to say that there aren’t important integrative publications, but rather that those kinds of big ideas are harder to come by, take longer to develop and explore fully, and don’t fit well into the typical tenure clock.

Caveat: I do not know about the development and changes in the tenure and publication system over the last several decades, so these are mostly uninformed opinions. I do not have the time to gather the data, so I’ll leave it up to someone else to take the idea and run with it, if it fits into their schedule.

Zimbardo on men

Watching TED’s podcast on my Apple TV, I saw one of the most rushed talks I’ve ever seen Phil Zimbardo give. A talk about how men are experiencing social change that impairs intimacy development, entitled “The Demise of Guys?” The premise is that there is an arousal addiction impelled by excessive internet, videogame, and pornography use. See what you think:

Phil Zimbardo on The Demise of Guys

Videogames and the ideal self

One of the topics we’re studying as part of Social Psychology this fall is the notion of the self. We each maintain an “ideal self” in our minds that represents who we aspire to be.

It appears that one of the outcomes of videogames is the ability to experiment with ideal selves and the pleasure we derive from being the ideal self. In fact, the more discrepancy there was between the actual self and the ideal self, the more players enjoyed the game.

“When somebody wants to feel they are more outgoing and then plays with this personality it makes them feel better in themselves when they play,” explained Dr. Przybylski.

The research is in press at Psychological Science, but was covered in a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Brand names and ad slogans produce different effects on behavior

A post on Mind Hacks pointed me toward a great post on the Language Log blog that covers a recent article on priming in response to brand names and ad slogans. It seems that if you prime using a brand name, you get behavior congruous with that brand’s associations; if you prime with the brand’s ad slogan, you get reverse effects. Here’s the summary from Language Log:

Laran et al. found that when they had people look at cost-conscious brand names like Walmart in an alleged memory study and then later take part in an imaginary shopping task, they were able to replicate the implicit priming effect: people were willing to spend quite a bit less than if they’d seen luxury-brand logos. But when subjects saw slogans (e.g. Save money. Live better.) instead of the brand names, there was a reverse priming effect: now, the luxury-brand slogans triggered more penny-pinching behavior than the economy-brand slogans.

The study authors argue that the “reverse priming” effect is driven by non-conscious processes to avoid bias. In other words, we associate slogans with attempts at persuasion, so the reverse priming kicks in to immunize us against the effect (and actually reverses it). Brand names do not have such an association, so we respond to their priming in congruence with the goals or constructs the brand elicits (e.g. Walmart = spend less).

Power and infidelity

courtesy flickr user JAS_photo, used under Creative Commons license

There have been several recent examples of powerful people engaging in infidelity. Consider some recent political examples: Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenneger, John Edwards. There are examples from business, but they are less well known. I often hear people ask, “why would such a powerful and successful person do those things?”

Well, it seems that the answer is in the question. Power is directly associated with infidelity. A recent study to be published in Psychological Science helps answer the question of what the relationship is between power and infidelity, and how that relationship might be explained by confidence, risk, and emotional distance.

Power, measured as position within an organizational hierarchy, had a direct effect on both future intentions toward infidelity and past infidelity behaviors. But in both cases, that relationship was fully explained by the person’s confidence in their ability to attract a romantic partner. In the case of intentions, the effect of power was also explained by the distance the person feels from their current relationship partner, but the relationship was weak compared to confidence.

Another question I also hear is “what is it about these powerful men?” Well, there is no statistical difference between men and women in the analysis. As the authors wrote: “Among women who had an independent source of income (as all our female respondents did, because they were working professionals), power had a positive relationship with infidelity, and this relationship was comparable to that found among men.” It appears that we hear about men more because men are simply a much larger proportion of people in powerful positions. As that changes, expect to see more women in such situations.

A common assumption in people’s impressions of these kinds of infidelities is that the person is dispositionally flawed – morally or just having bad judgment. This is an instance of the fundamental attribution error, whereby we attribute people’s behavior more to their personality than the situation.  But an interesting implication of this finding is that it is not the person (or gender), but the ways in which the situation—specifically power—has an effect on the person’s confidence that they would be attractive to a romantic partner, which in turn has an effect on infidelity.

An interesting extension to the present research would be to manipulate power to see if it would have a similar effect. That is, place randomly selected individuals either in a powerful position in a group or less powerful position and see if that might affect future intentions to engage in infidelity. I suspect this is something that develops over time, and may not be manipulated in the short term involved in laboratory studies, but it might.

Research Article:
Joris Lammers, Janka I. Stoker, Jennifer Jordan, Monique Pollmann, and Diederik A. Stapel
Power Increases Infidelity Among Men and Women
Psychological Science July 2011 , first published on July 19, 2011
doi: 10.1177/0956797611416252

NOTE: this article was cleared of any academic fraud perpetrated by Diederik Stapel.

Mirror neuronapalooza

Courtesy Flickr user Christopher Neugebauer. Used under Creative Commons license.

The APS journal Perspectives in Psychological Science is making a mirror neuron forum open-access until September 1. Here’s a list of the articles in this issue:

Special Forum on Mirror Neurons

Introduction to the Mirror Neuron Forum

Arthur M. Glenberg
Mirror neurons are neurons that are active when an animal is engaging in a certain activity (e.g., eating a banana) as well as when that animal is watching another animal engage in the same activity. This introduction provides a historical review of mirror neuron research, discusses the methods used to research mirror neurons, and defines terms that are common in the field. Glenberg also weighs the pros and cons of each research method with a particular focus on methods that are used to research mirror neurons in humans.

Mirror Neuron Forum

Vittorio Gallese, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, Cecilia Heyes, Gregory Hickok, and Marco Iacoboni
Depending on the researcher you ask, mirror neurons are either the hottest topic in neurobiology or they are merely another neural cell type. Five researchers with varying opinions were brought together to discuss six questions about the fundamental characteristics of mirror neurons and the putative roles these cells have in learning processes, neural development, social cognition, and human disease. In the forum, each participant was given a chance to address each question and an additional chance to respond to the other participants’ answers.

Positions in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Arthur M. Glenberg
As a conclusion to the Mirror Neuron Forum, the author discusses the points that were made during the discussion and highlights areas where theory or methods could be improved. Overall, Glenberg concludes, progress is being made in the understanding of how the mirror neuron system supports various psychological processes even though the responses from the forum participants were not unanimous.